Hero on the skids

Don't read this post if you plan to watch Hancock any time soon.

It's an intriguing idea.  Take the best part of Superman III, the middle third in which Superman, poisoned by red kryptonite, turns into a resentful, self-pitying, troublemaking jerk until his good side, his real self, which, interestingly, is Clark Kent, reasserts itself in a battle of literally split personalities, and expand that into a whole movie.

But you don't want your hero acting like a jerk for two hours.  Even if they know he's going to turn back into his old loveable, heroic self at the end, people aren't going to turn out to watch Superman being an asshole.

What if he's not Superman?

DC's not going to give you the rights anyway.  Make him a superhero like Superman.  Give him most of Superman's powers, the cool ones.  He's faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he does it all without the cape and the red underwear.

There goes the red kryptonite though.  And people still aren't going to root for an asshole.  You need something else, another reason he's turned into a jerk, something not his fault, something he can't snap out of easily.  A super-heartbreak?   His Lex Luthor kills his Lois Lane and he blames himself?

A little too Spider-man.

A super-disease?

A super-injury?

Now you're talking recovery, not transformation at the end.  You want him to go from being one person to being another and then back to being himself.  As if he's forgotten who he was and has to fight to remember.

That's it!

Amnesia.

He's got super-amnesia.

Now you're ready to start.   

Begin by asking these questions.

What if Superman forgot who he was?  What if he woke up one day and couldn't remember himself, what if he'd forgotten not just his identity but what made him who he was, his experiences, his former affections, his virtues and the vices he'd had to master and suppress, all the lessons in responsibility and duty and humility and charity and compassion he'd been taught by his Ma and Pa Kent---what if he couldn't remember his Pa Kent saying, "I don't know why you're here, but it's not just to score touchdowns and hit home runs"?  What if he couldn't recall his Jor-el telling him his purpose is to inspire and give people hope, which is to ask, what if he didn't know he had a purpose?  What if he woke up confused, alone, a total mystery to himself, and the first thing he learns about himself is that he has superpowers and the next thing he learns is that everybody expects him to use these powers to help them?  How would he react?

And what if the answer is, Not well?

He's still the same person at heart.  A good guy.  A hero, even.  But he has no memory of being a hero, of what it feels like, of what's required of him, of the sacrifices and discipline necessary, but no memory either of the satisfactions and the rewards either.  He has all these awesome abilities but nobody thinks they're his to do with as he pleases.  They expect things of him.  They expect everything of him.  They expect miracles?  Every day.  All day.  "Save us!" they're always crying, and he, being a hero, tries.  But along with having forgotten himself, he's forgotten his training.  He doesn't remember how to go about being a hero.  He makes mistakes.  He saves the day, but he breaks things, hurts innocent bystanders, lets the bad guys get away.

People get mad.

They don't understand.

They don't believe he has a problem.

As far as they're concerned, he's what he always was, so why the screw-ups?

Instead of being grateful when he shows up, they're almost afraid.  And they're demanding.  They insist he could be his old self, if he tried.  If he cared.

His old self, though?  Who's that?  What's that?  From they way they react, from the things they say, it seems to him his old self was a god or an angel, at least.

He's not a god.  He's not an angel.  He's just...some guy.  Some...him.  He's trying.  He wants to help.  But not if people are going to hate him for it.  Not if they're going to treat him like he's the bad guy.  Fuck that.

He grows bitter.  He becomes resentful.  He quits.  Tries to quit.  Tells himself he's going to quit.   But he can't do it.  He's a hero, even if he can't remember what that means.  It's his nature, helping people.  So he keeps at it.  But with less and less patience.  With less and less tolerance for the ingratitude and the abuse.  With less and less interest and concern.

He's careless.

He's reckless.

He's destructive.  Deliberately.  He begins to enjoy the messes he creates.  He begins to like it that people hate him. 

What's really happening is he's learning to hate himself.  He's becoming self-destructive.  If his Lex Luthor were to turn up now with a lump of whatever it is acts like green kryptonite on him, he might not actually welcome it, but he might not try hard enough to escape.

Geez.  This is turning into a downer.

Ok, then.  You're at the point where you save him.

How do you do it?

Does he stumble upon his Fortress of Solitude and hear the voices of his Jor-el and Lara?

Does his Ma Kent rise from whatever hospital bed she's been lying unconscious in until this point and make her way from Kansas to Metropolis to recall him to himself with the power of a mother's love?

Does his Batman escape from the clutches of his Joker and come up with a cure in the laboratory in his Batcave?

Does his Lois come back from the dead and reawaken his memory with a kiss?

Possibilities.

But how about something not quite so corny and dramatic?

What if he's just...inspired?

What if he meets some regular guy who wants to be a hero but doesn't have the power or the opportunities a superhero has?  What if our hero watches this regular guy struggling to do the world some good?  What if through him our hero learns what it means to be a hero again?

What do you have then?

You have the premise of Hancock, is what.

You have the premise.  Unfortunately, you don't have the plot.

Director Peter Berg and screenwriters Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan apparently asked themselves all those questions and then decided not dramatize their answers to most of them.  Hancock open with our hero already on the skids, eight years into his decline, with whoever he once was and whatever caused his amnesia and his fall from grace with the public and his slide into bitterness, resentment, and self-destructiveness having taken place off camera well before our story begins.

The movie begins, then, with ten minutes of the Adventures of Superasshole, with no explanation of why Hancock is what he is and no reason for us to root for his recovery or redemption except that he's played by Will Smith and so we know he must be a good guy.

Now I'll tell you why you shouldn't be reading this if you want to watch the movie.

You might like it.

I did...until about five seconds after it ended, then I had time to think about what I'd just watched.

Lot of movies like that.  Fun while they last, not worth a thought afterwards.

You go into one with your critical thinking cap on, though, you'll wind up robbing yourself of 87 minutes or so of harmless pleasure.

I'll say this for Hancock, compared to recent superhero movies, while it's nowhere near as good as Ironman or The Dark Knight, I liked it better than The Incredible Hulk, which wasn't half-bad, and in its focus on storytelling over video gaming, interest in its own characters, and careful use of CGI it has Spider-Man 3 beat all to hell.

It's still not a good movie though.

First on the list of why it isn't are the problems caused by the movie's starting too far into story.  Instead of engaging our sympathy by showing us Hancock going "bad," Berg pushes us away from him by immediately treating us to the spectacle of Hancock being bad.  "Who cares what happens to this jerk?" isn't the best question to put in an audience's collective thoughts at any point in a film, let alone in its opening fifteen minutes.  The script tries to bring us to root for Hancock in a round about way, by having us want him to reform for the sake of another character, a down on his luck public relations expert who wants to save through the world and sees an opportunity to inspire people through Hancock, if only he can convince Hancock to clean up his act.

This could have worked, but Ray, the PR guy, played by Jason Bateman, is a vaguely drawn character whose main claims on our sympathies are that he's the father of an adorable little kid and the husband of Charlize Theron.  The parallels between Ray's self-effacing ambition to be a hero at one remove and Hancock's self-loathing desire to stop being one at all aren't developed because there's no time.  The story has to move on.  We've barely met Ray before he's at work at refurbishing Hancock's image.

Starting with Hancock already at the bottom of the well he's fallen into leaves the movie with nowhere to go but straight to his climbing out, and that's what happens.  What ought to be the beginning of the last third of the movie arrives at the end of the first third.  Hancock is back to being a hero by the middle of the movie.  In order to keep the movie going, the filmmakers more or less backtrack.   They start explaining what happened before the movie started.  But the explanation isn't dramatized.  It's described.  We might expect at least a couple of flashbacks here, but what we're given are characters shouting exposition at each other over the sounds of buildings and cars being smashed. 

Hancock doesn't hang together tonally.  The first part, Hancock's screw-ups and his getting his act back together through anger management classes, is played for laughs.  The second part is played as a domestic drama, although a domestic drama set against the background of a superhero video game, and the the final third of the film degenerates into the worst sort of Hollywood sentimentality as Berg and company try to make us cry over the deaths of characters we know aren't going to stay dead.

Hancock does end on an interesting note.  Hancock does not recover his memory.  He isn't given his identity back, only his sense of purpose. 

This is the superhero nightmare, that the costume will swallow up the human being who wears it.  Peter Parker literally lived this one out in the early days of the Venom saga.  It is Ben Grimm's tragedy.  It's Bruce Banner's horror.  It's Bruce Wayne's temptation and it's Tony Stark's reason for being.  it's all Captain America had for a life.  It's the psychodrama behind that part of Superman III I started this post with.  The "bad" Superman created by the red kryptonite is the incarnation of Superman's buried resentments at having to be Superman all the time.  When the bad Superman is defeated by not a "good" Superman but by Clark Kent it's a triumph of heart and soul over ego.  Superman doesn't exist.  He's just a costume.  The hero is and has been all along, Clark Kent.   It was a pretty clever way of explaining why Superman is the most well-adjusted of all the superheroes.  He doesn't have to become somebody else in order to do his good deeds, nor does he have to keep some part of himself in check.  He's not Peter Parker, and he's not Bruce Wayne.  He is just who he is.  An overgrown Boy Scout.

Too bad in all other respects Superman III's a dumb movie.

Comments

[Mike Schilling]

What dirt on Jason Bateman have on the Power That Be that he always gets to be Charlize Theron's SO?

[Sarah TX]

What if he meets some regular guy who wants to be a hero but doesn't have the power or the opportunities a superhero has? What if our hero watches this regular guy struggling to do the world some good? What if through him our hero learns what it means to be a hero again?

Then you're halfway to a Hancock/Ray slashfic. :)

Seriously, though. I was shocked when I started to see Hancock fanfiction pop up, but your post pretty much explains exactly which holes fans have a pathological need to fill.

[Sarah TX]

Oh jeez, the last sentence of my last comment was not meant to be an entendre of any sort :)

[Shayera]

I was rewriting the movie in my head as I was watching it! There was a good and interesting story in the premise. But it somehow got so lost on it's way to the screen. And I have to say, Charlize Theron's Mary irritated me. She was mean. To both Ray and Hancock. She lied to Ray, despite insisting she loved him. And she was mean to Hancock, despite knowing that he had lost his memory.
I think the story they wanted to tell got lost in the endless reshoots they did.
Did you know that they're apparently going to be doing a sequel?

[Marc G.]

I have to disagree with you on the timing of the beginning of the movie. We start with only the knowledge of Hancock that the rest of the world has, and that makes the story more engaging. If we witness Hancock as he was before he lost his memory, then it takes away some of the uncertainty about whether he can or will reform, and it changes Ray from someone who's willing to take a chance on a complete asshole to someone who happened to catch the beginning of the movie he's in.